EDITORIAL: Time to make decision on budget

After several years of growing the county’s bureaucracy and greatly expanding county debt, declining revenues this year put the county into a financial tailspin.

If county leaders don’t get the upcoming year’s budget right and stop the financial bleeding, Barrow County could find itself in a state of virtual bankruptcy.
But do county leaders have the courage to make the hard choices?

So far, most members of the Barrow County Board of Commissioners have expended a lot of hot air about the budget, but few seem willing to make real decisions. At its meeting Tuesday night, the BOC decided to “ask the public” for help in making a decision on how to close a $2.2 million gap.

That sounds to us like a cop-out. Members of the BOC were elected to make decisions on behalf of their constituents. Most citizens don’t have a clue about the arcane details in the county budget document.

And anyway, the county’s financial situation has been discussed and debated and reported in this newspaper for weeks; if members of the BOC don’t already have some idea of what their constituents think by now, they haven’t been paying attention.

There are essentially three options facing the BOC:

1. Don’t do any more cost cutting and raise taxes around 2-mills to close the budget gap.

2. Don’t raise taxes and cut $2.2 million more from the budget, most of which would have to come from the Sheriff’s Office and Jail operations. (The rest of the county budget has been pretty well slashed to the minimum.)

3. Split the difference: Raise taxes 1-mill and then go into the Sheriff’s operations and cut the rest (this is BOC Chairman Danny Yearwood’s proposal.)

The real problem here for members of the BOC — and the reason they’re seemingly reluctant to make a decision — is that all three of those options carry heavy political baggage:

• If the board just raises taxes, it will anger a significant number of constituents who are already underwater on their home values and who are struggling in the down economy. Although some people’s property values fell this year, a 20 percent hike in the millage rate would hit just about everyone in the county.

• On the other hand, cutting $2.2 million from the sheriff’s budgets would pit the BOC against one of the county’s most popular elected officials. While some did question the sheriff’s recent wish-list budget calling for even more spending in his department, he remains very popular personally across the county. That doesn’t appear to be a fight the BOC wants.

• The BOC also appears to have trouble with the third “Yearwood option.” That proposal would still pit the board against the Sheriff, but it would also mean raising taxes. Everyone gets hit and nobody is happy.

Time is running tight for the BOC to decide what it needs to do for the FY2010 budget. It can ask for feedback and solicit advice, but in the end, there is no magic bullet that will fix Barrow County’s massive financial problems.

It’s time for the BOC to make a decision and then move forward.